May 17 – Recommended Reading

May 17, 2011

Following on from my post in early May I thought I would share some articles that caught my attention this past week:

Continuous Deployment, Getting started is easier than you think – John Wedgwood, April 2011
An introduction to continuous deployment that is tailored towards startups. Any team can take the steps detailed in this article and move their own environment forward – focus on the high value items and continually inspect and adapt based on what you see.

Splitting User Stories – George Dinwiddie, May 2011
George provides a useful guide to assist with splitting user stories. More recently I have been trying to follow his suggestion of looking at the acceptance tests as individual stories. That approach seems to resonate with the engineers in the @GreenHopperTeam.

Flying Blind – Marty Cagan, May 2011
Marty’s book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard is a favourite of mine – I’ve lent it out a few times now and someone has yet to return it! In this article Marty focuses on the importance of user activity data in making product decisions. I’m struggling with the first step of this at present as none of the products I am responsible for (GreenHopper, Atlassian Translations, JIRA Wallboards) provides sufficient information to make informed decisions.

Do you want to recommend an article? Reach me on Twitter @njm.